


felis cattus nightvalicus

by too_much_in_the_sun



Series: Coyote tales [3]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Gen, Navajo Character, Weaving
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-28
Updated: 2014-01-28
Packaged: 2018-01-10 08:34:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1157460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/too_much_in_the_sun/pseuds/too_much_in_the_sun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dana makes a friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	felis cattus nightvalicus

The clock in the break room had just turned midnight, blinking redly like a reset VCR, and Dana was making a new pot of coffee. She shook cinnamon over the grounds and slipped the cover on the brew basket, then plugged the coffeemaker in, rubbing it gently as if to propitiate whatever spirits oversaw the making of coffee. Some intern years ago had brought in this one as a replacement for the ancient percolator that had preceded it as station coffee source, and it had sat on the counter ever since. If you moved it there would probably be a ring of dust around the base.

She heard Cecil's soft, dragging footsteps in the hall, his knock on the door of the break room. Station Management howled and sloshed. A fluorescent light flickered overhead and she suppressed a yawn. “Yeah?”

“Dana. I have an assignment for you.”

The door creaked as he leaned against its frame, and she turned to look at him. He wasn't due on air yet for another hour.

“What kind of assignment?” If it was 'investigate something outside the station', she'd need to check out a gun from the weapons locker in the basement; if it was 'I need you to order these files', she wouldn't have to bother with the three flights of stairs required to access the basement. The elevator wouldn't go down there anymore. You'd get in and press the button, the doors would close, the machinery would hum and clank around you, and the elevator would spit you back out on the same floor you'd gotten on from.

Cecil blinked, once, like a Gila monster in the sun. “I want you to investigate something in the men's room. The door is unlocked, but I put an Out of Order sign on the door, so no one should bother you while you're there.”

“Cecil, what kind of something is this?”

"Telling you would alter your perception of it,” he said, and blinked again. It had taken her months of working with Cecil to pin down what made him odd to interact with: he blinked much less than most people did, and often when he blinked a scrim of white covered his sclera, iris, and pupil, making his eyes seem blank and white. “It shouldn't be harmful to you. I'd just like you to... go in and write your thoughts about it.”

“Can't I take a tape recorder with me?” They'd tried to use the digital recorders once, before Dana got her internship. Apparently something about the station itself tended to erase data recorded that way. You could record in the field just fine, but playing the recordings back inside the studio just didn't work.

“No.” Another slow blink, and the scrim of white took longer to fade this time. "I have reason to suspect that tape recorders won't work in there. You should be able to make notes on an iPad just fine, though." He smiled warmly. The ban on writing utensils didn't technically hold for reporters getting information for a story. At least, it was a grey area, and Cecil had gotten away with it before with just that excuse.

Then again, he was Cecil Endishchee, Voice of Night Vale, and she was Dana Flores, Intern.

“OK. Do you need me to do anything else before you go on air?”

“No. Thank you.” He paused. “I'll take some of that coffee, though.”

She'd heard Cecil enthuse about Perfect Carlos, had heard him give Steve Carlsberg an on-air tongue-lashing, had heard him briskly mourn other interns (Miguel had left after a month for Big Rico's, judging it best to get out before Cecil had to give his parents condolences). On Fridays after they closed up the station they got coffee together with Coyote. And no matter the situation, Cecil always sounded like he was reading from a script. Perfectly composed and put-together, and even his deviations into valley-girl speak over cats or Carlos seemed... organized. She envied that.

“Help yourself,” she said, and patted the coffeemaker. It hissed and shook under her hand. “It should be done in a minute.”

“I'm in no hurry.” Blink. “You're going to investigate the men's room?”

“Well, yeah, I might as well get it over with.” She grabbed her iPad from the counter where she'd set it down earlier. She'd been playing Cthulhu Crush, but Cecil didn't need to know what she did with station equipment on her off-time.

“Good idea.” He nodded. “Be sure and save your notes to the station Dropbox when you're done. The printer still isn't working, and I'm waiting for Station Management to get back to me about making a flesh sacrifice to try and fix it. I sent them the paperwork, but...” He shrugged.

“All right.” Dana glanced back at the coffeemaker, still gurgling away as watery, dark liquid dripped into the carafe. They were almost out of sugar, and Hassan had bought coffee supplies for the station last month, which made it her turn. She'd have to stop by the Ralph's on her way home.

Cecil nodded politely and moved towards the coffeemaker as she left the breakroom. His left leg lagged behind him slightly, his boot rasping against the carpet in the dead air of the quiet station.

The lights overhead flickered on as she walked down the hall, pushing back the darkness. Station Management had instituted an energy-conservation policy on the first of the year, complete with motion-activated switches for the hall lights, but in practice there was no difference. The lights had flickered since they were installed, and would go on flickering as long as the station stood.

One of the arc-sodium streetlights that overlooked the parking lot shed a yellow-orange glow that diffused along the bare left wall, dyeing it a dusty monochrome.

After Jim Hoskie died in Radon Canyon, he had left some of his famous weavings to the station, and most of them hung along this corridor. The shivering light from the fluorescents overhead made them seem to move and dance, but she knew it was only an illusion, and she did not stop to examine them. All Jim's weavings drew life from some other source, something that wasn't weak fluorescent light. If she wanted to see them move, she'd have come back in the daytime.

Marie Saganitso, when Dana had first taken the internship at the station, had told her what some of the weavings showed, but that had been a long time ago. The first four were Talking God, Water Sprinkler, Growling God, and Black God, but she had forgotten what the others were. She needed to get together with Marie sometime anyway; they'd fallen out of contact gradually, and Dana missed her friendship.

Down at the end of the line of weavings, just before the door to the men's room, one weaving hung on its own. She remembered what this one was, and she stopped to look at it for a moment, iPad clutched to her chest, its smooth surface cool against her fingertips.

The last weaving was a portrait of Coyote, taken from life. It was one of the last weavings Jim had completed before his death in the canyon, and he had left it to Coyote in his will. Coyote, in return, had loaned it to the station, on the condition it be displayed with the other weavings. He claimed that his likeness would get lonely if it was displayed alone.

Jim had been a master craftsman, according to Cecil and Coyote, who had both seen him at work before he died. Cecil said that it was as if his loom were part of his body. Coyote had let the statement stand on its own, adding only a wolfish grin when Dana asked why he thought so.

The portrait really did look like him. According to Coyote, at least, most portraits of him stopped resembling him soon after they were made. Sand paintings were an exception, apparently, but Dana had never seen a sand painting of him. She doubted that sand could quite capture the glitter of his deep brown eyes the way Jim had in yarn, or the sheen of his pink and human tongue as it flopped out of his mouth.

Coyote was not easy to capture; even his image eluded.

She turned away from the weaving as the lights began to click off behind her. Looking at Jim's weavings for too long was, apparently, dangerous in some way. She'd never had any bad experiences, but it was best not to taunt fate in Night Vale. Even with Coyote as a friend. _Especially_ with Coyote as a friend.

Dana pushed open the door to the bathroom. Cool air tickled the little black hairs on her arms, and she sniffed tentatively, hoping that the place wouldn't smell too offensive. She was determined to finish this assignment, whatever it actually was, but having to do it while the smell of public bathroom hung in her nose would be a little much.

But it was clean, and smelled a little bit of sagebrush, mostly of cold night air. There was a small, rectangular window high up on the far wall, and it was propped open with what looked like a bit of tumbleweed stalk from a very large tumbleweed. Cecil swore by tumbleweed stalk for keeping evil spirits out of open windows, she remembered at random.

Dana drew her gaze away from the little window (one star was visible through it, glimmering in the velvet-dark night sky), and surveyed the bathroom, beginning with the stalls to her left. They were beige metal, and spotless. There were three of them, one handicapped-accessible.

There were three urinals along the right-hand wall, white porcelain and gray steel. Above them, a laminated sign was taped to the wall, reading PLEASE WASH YOUR HANDS in neat type. There were smiley faces at each corner, each with a different number of eyes and a different mouth configuration.

She turned to look at the door she'd come in through -- wood, with a metal plate where the handle would be so you didn't have to touch a handle and could just shove against the door to open it. And she turned again to look at the sinks, already wondering why Cecil had sent her here, when she saw something she did not expect.

There was an animal sleeping between the sinks, about four feet off the ground. Its head was tucked snugly under its tail, and its side rose and fell slowly as it breathed in and out. It was covered in fur that looked like velvet felt, the same color as Dana's own tanned forearms, a deep, familiar brown. She smelled cinnamon and cloves, and the animal rolled over in its sleep, mouth opening to expose long, thin fangs in an unconscious yawn.

She was looking right at it. Her head was pointed in the right direction. Yet the outline of the animal seemed to shimmer and move, its features vague as if it were at the very edge of her vision. Its fur was long, and then it was not, and then it was covered in tiny scales. It was small, and then it was large, a three-dimensional part of a fourth-dimensional animal, just one aspect of a being so much larger than her tiny universe that it was impossible to really conceive. It was asleep, paws and ears twitching as it dreamed, and then it was awake, aware of all things that passed in Night Vale, observing but not judging.

Dana rubbed her eyes with both hands, and when the blur had cleared from her sight, she saw what she had been failing to see, even as she tried to carefully observe.

It was only a cat. Well, not _only_. But to all appearances, the animal was a cat -- a male cat, with medium-length fur still the same color as her tanned skin, mouth still hanging open to expose its fangs.

She stepped closer and bent down, half-squatting, to take a closer look. The smell of cinnamon and cloves was unmistakeable, and there was a faint whiff of something else that she couldn't quite identify. It was a little like the void, but with a touch of curry.

The cat yawned and stirred, eyes opening slowly to regard her with feline indolence. Dana stood back up, and stretched out a hand for him to sniff. The cat craned his neck forward, sniffing daintily at her fingers, his whiskers tickling.

“What's your name, kitty?” she asked, aware all of a sudden that she should've been taking notes the whole time. Well, it could wait. One of her hands was occupied holding her iPad, and the cat was sniffing the other one, his nose now snuffling over her wrist.

A little breeze brushed against her skin from the window, and she dreaded going to the Ralph's later. What she wanted was to walk over to the Moonlite All-Nite for pie, letting the warm darkness wash around her, the wind wrap her in its arms. Maybe she didn't want pie at all, but to walk on out into the desert, the sand breathing the last of the sun's heat into her soles, jackrabbits rustling in the brush, and the stars breaking the utter blackness of the sky, making it all the deeper by comparison.

Dana scratched under the cat's chin, trying to let her mind open in the way that Cecil had taught her on one of their coffee nights, relaxing and letting it unfurl like a night-blooming flower.

“Your name is Khoshekh,” said Dana, and he purred under her hand.  


End file.
